When To Worry About Scary Symptoms: Hypochondriac Vs Doctor

I’m a hypochondriac. Big time. Well, like Woody Allen, I’m more of an alarmist. I think everything fatal. At my first real job, my superiors would refer to me as “little Woody Allen” because I’d pace around the office muttering about blood-clots that I was so sure were making their way to my lungs, all because my foot hurt. Just the other day, my best friend gifted me lovingly with a book called Hypochondria Can Kill by John Naish. I can’t wait to read it, I think it’s really going to kick my hypochondriac affliction up a notch and totally confirm that I am, indeed, hurtling rapidly toward the grave.

Obviously, due to my potentially life-threatening worries, I had to check out this Health.com post by a Harvard Medical School graduate because it was going to tell me which of my fatal symptoms that I’m constantly experiencing I should calm down about. Hopefully the article helped some people, but it just reminded me about things that can and are definitely going wrong with my body and killing me right now.

Elizabeth Rosenthal shared “some common medical worries you can set aside—along with a little guidance on when you should indulge them” in an effort to use her expertise to mollify people’s anxieties about troubling symptoms occurring the one body they’ll ever have and its eventual mortality.

Here are the terrifying symptoms, why Rosenthal thinks you should chill and why I never ever will: